"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
— Larry Niven

"Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds."
— Carl Sagan

"Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer."
— Humphrey Davy

"I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side."
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)

"Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure."
— Antonio Porchia

"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."
— Ansel Adams

"I put my hands on her shoulders and said "slemp."
Then she put hers on mine and said "slemp.""
— Ann M. Martin